when I first woke up, some time after my adolescence, I noticed all the other stars around me were dying—before then I thought I’d live forever—at least now I can talk to you—I can say I have a better understanding of your world, all that business over Eden, all those words used to describe it…
Life makes a sea full of superfluous things. In shallow waters among seagrass meadows hide toy dragons with frilly appendages like tattered leaves. Such dragon wings, never meant for flight, help them merge into the background of kelp beds, swaying back and forth with the lukewarm current, back and forth like flotsam. Their eyes above…
Why anyone wanted a God the Watcher eluded me. Mystery. But then, one wants to be noted, or at least, noteworthy. Worth keeping an eye on, and so, behaving a little better than might otherwise. And so while reading A Hole Is to Dig maybe my delivery has improved taking pains to pronounce: children are…
There was the time I got stuck in a long line of cars entering a parking garage. Impatiently, I left my car (motor still on) and went for a walk. I walked around the park, under the big shade trees. The ground, that time of year, was covered with pine needles and my feet crunched…
The road is impassable, a shelf on the side of a mountain the wind keeps sweeping clear to fill with possessions for the new year: fresh snow, and the North Country light that Polaris, king of hunger and the shivering animals, king of branches that snap in the cold, sends as its indifferent benediction. King…
Siba keeps shaking his head as if pushing a vision away. His chest is heaving, tears are spilling down his cheeks, but he is silent, choking back any sound. We are walking west on East Eighty-sixth Street, the leafless trees of Central Park a few blocks ahead. We move under a green awning and past…
Back home where Paul’s mother lived it flooded Friday night. When his catering shift was over, at one a.m., he got his backpack from the servery and saw that she had called. On the message her voice was dull and strained, emptied by hopeless labor. She’d been bailing out the basement since eight, until her…
I can’t sleep. I feel the globe making a rotation, and I’m not supposed to be, but I’m awake for it. I’m at that age when everyone is talking about the kinds of love they’ve been using to get by. It’s a very dark late. The sound of a towel dropping off the rack into…
Even now, forty-one years later, if I think of him, his name comes back (both his names) immediately and easily: gliding up from an opaque and then translucent depth, flashing to the surface like markers for a wreck or trap, like floats from a storm-torn net. “Mr. Jerome.” “Theodore” (I never called him that but…
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